Botanica
by TonicPeppermint
Summary: Upon learning an old friend will soon die of the same disease that killed his mother, Bo reflects on his childhood. [On hiatus.]
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:** Before we begin, allow me to emphasize that all love mentioned in this chapter is strictly brotherly/sisterly/friendly, in no way romantic. Of course the characters aforementioned _are not_ siblings, the mutual feeling is still that of a near family connection. Got that? This'll all be developed later, no worries. Just keep in mind this is not a love story, not in the traditional sense. With this said, enjoy, and don't forget to leave me a review on your way out. Pretty please? And, of course, thanks for reading.

&&&&&&

He woke to the ping-pong racket of soft-spoken footsteps echoing off the fire escape. The glare of light through curtains told a tale of early afternoon, and screaming bones as he lifted himself from blankets and pillows near ceased his impromptu awakening. He peered down at yesterday's clothes, his legs draped over the arm of the couch, and shook himself awake, groaning at whomever outside thought it wise to rouse him. A sharp _crack!_ panged against the windowpane, followed by another and another. He flinched once, twice, and caught a glimpse of her knuckles rapping on the window, splintering the glass.

Regardless of the great quantity of time since he had seen her last, since he had even _expected_ to see her anew, he had no doubt that it was _she._

Bo picked himself up off the couch, wandering out into the hall. Opting to slide down the curling banister rather than walk the crooked steps of the staircase, he transcended the ceiling, as he might a wide-open trap door, and let himself into the room with the bookcase walls. Unlike his late father's study, photographs and books adorned these shelves, as opposed to medical texts and surgical equipment and dead creatures only partially formed, swimming in formalyde putridity. His living in the other houses, trying on the lives of the long gone or long deceased townspeople, was a way of entertaining himself throughout the intervals of time when no travelers made their way through Ambrose. Aside from the pastor's picket fenced home a couple of blocks from the church, this was the only building he'd spent almost no time in.

Down another set of stairs, he found himself on the ground floor of the Confectionary. It had been a penny candy store when he was a kid, next door to the soda fountain. The owner of the place, who'd earned himself a spot in the House of Wax, had hated Bo with a startling passion. Not such a surprise, as he had much preferred stealing fistfuls of candy than paying for them way back when he'd frequented this place.

Now, the barrels of chocolate and lollipops had long since melted or spoiled, the rock candy coagulating into a sticky purple mess on the counter. Years back, when Vincent, Lester, and he systematically rid Ambrose of all life, they had let the children be. The handful of kids had flocked to this place, and, without parents, subsequently died. They'd no notion of proper food, he remembered thinking, watching them run listlessly about the town. In pools of vomit he found a few, their stinking insides gilded and honey coated, face down in peanut butter and apple juice and sticky blood that clung to shoes like black glue. _Stupid fucking kids,_ he used to tell himself. _This place isn't a damn labyrinth. They could have found a way out._

A rack of plastic two inch soldiers, parachute clad, stood to one side of the barrels. He took hold of one, smiling vaguely and unraveling the toy. He let it drop, its descent lessened by the parachute, before landing in a heap by his feet. He shook his head, kicking it away, but nevertheless grabbed a handful to take up to the roof.

Outside, the air was biting as he hoisted himself onto the fire escape, clinging to any exposed skin. Bo had lost all sense of time long ago, as well any desire to figure it out, and knew only it must be the end of summer or the beginning of fall. Whether it was September or October or even November he did not know and did not care.

Up the wrought iron steps and up top the roof he met her, as he'd expected. If she saw him, she didn't acknowledge it, and she certainly didn't dress for spectacular company. She wore his blue canvas work pants, petrol stained and otherwise malformed, the crotch of which hung far below what would have been fitting. They were held up by some salvaged man's belt, though almost ineffectually. She had told him once she simply didn't like wearing her own clothes, but he suspected it had more to do with trying to understand him or be more a part of him. It was often he found her swamped by a wife beater of his, or plodding along in his boots or worn baseball cap. She told him she missed being, in her own words, "In On It." Being one of the brothers. She took a swig of ginger beer, cringing at the peppery sting in her throat.

Her hair was short, dandelion and ochre dusted, reaching only to the nape of her neck. It curled upward beside her ears, testing her patience unless pinned back with the large marmalade hairclip she'd found in some decrepit beauty salon. She was long lashed and owl eyed and red lipped, a scrawny sort of thing; he and Vincent towered over her.

She saw him, thrusting her shoulders back noncommittally, so that her small breasts were shockingly visible beneath the skimpy scrimmage cut-offs, revealing a flat expanse of midriff. His gut went thump-thump, getting all hot-sick and beggarly straight to his groin.

_Why haven't you fucked her yet, Bo?_ he asked himself.

He replied with an incredulous, _Because she could have been your sister. Very nearly was._

"You woke me up," he called to her, drowsy, dropping the parachute men onto the building's asphalt roof. She, the sentry, staring off into space as if watching for something, lapsed in her duty and shut her eyes, the still-cool bottle of ginger beer held against her forehead. Flushed by the heated stucco, she turned to face him.

"Roo, I missed your pouch," she said, softly. Smirking.

Grinning, he thought back on their childhood, how they'd referred to each other as Kanga and Roo, and Vincent as Joey when he felt left out. _How old had they been? Seven? Eight?_ He and she; they'd chase each other across town, wrestling, ignoring the chastations of the older folks. Later, in the woods, they might curl up in some abandoned animal hovel or hollowed out tree stump, and she'd knot her fingers in his hair, scratching his scalp carelessly, as he'd bury his face in her messy, nettle-grove tangles.

After she'd been sent away – he supposed that's when he'd gone bad. He'd engage in petty vandalism or reckless driving or some kind of troublemaking just to fill up on all the time he spent missing her, escalating into his most calamitous, _his most_ _dire_, behavior. After Mama died and he'd been years without the girl he'd gotten on so well with, he supposed he got impatient and spiteful, and he and his brothers took that out on the Ambrosians. He'd forgotten almost entirely about her until the day she showed up in town; nineteen, wide-eyed, and not so young anymore. She'd made her way to the home of her childhood and, upon discovering her mother still and waxen and long since dead, stroked the figurine's palm and said, "He's done an awful thing, Mama. Real awful."

He felt guilty only then, and knew if she hadn't been sent away when all the dying occurred he may very well have killed her, too.

But that was all years ago.

She'd always had a peripatetic streak, wandering in and out of Ambrose when the notion struck her. And this time, she'd been gone more than a year. There had been days he thought she must be dead, and now that he looked her up and down she seemed halfway there already. He was shocked by the rust colored cigarette burns that mingled with the cracked skin 'neath the underbelly of her jaw, the grey-green faintness situated within the hollows of her throat.

He stepped forward, grabbing her chin roughly and tilting it upwards. "What happened?" he asked.

She shrugged, staring blankly. "I forget things, sometimes." Nudging the parachute men with her feet, she asked, "For me?"

He nodded.

She stooped, lifting one cautiously. The string came undone easily, and, loosing its parachute, she threw it upwards and over the edge of the roof. It drifted, becoming entangled in a bush on its way down. She held herself noiselessly, still before the shuddering foliage behind her, watching her own hands. They shook violently.

"Turns out I'm dying, Bo."

Her name was Oleander, Olie with a single "L" for short. Lee for even shorter.

"I wanted to talk to you about getting older," she continued, "and thinking back. I think a lot of times people get older and think back about someone from their past – _the one who got away._ Like from the movies. I thought maybe if I didn't hurry up and get back here, that I would be that girl for you."

_Almost your sister,_ he told himself. He loved her like one, but couldn't help but want her tousled and undone in his bed. Perhaps there was something indomitably wrong with this, but regardless they were so far from reality it hardly mattered anymore.

"Kiddo, you've been gone ages and ages. I didn't _let_ you get away. You up and left yourself." He smiled large and proper and took her hand, brought her fingers to his face. Her thumb in his mouth, she bit down on her bottom lip, arching her back. What little he had of her screamed of acidity – turpentine, petrol, acetone. Out of the corner of his mouth, he asked, " How far from me you feelin' now?"

She scrunched up her nose, chiding, "Don't make fun, Bo. I'm _dying_."

"You don't look too bad, darlin'."

"That's a damn lie. Don't look bad, maybe, but I look doomed."

He ignored her. "How far from me you feelin' _now_?" He stepped closer, stomach to chest. She pointed down below, at the parachute men entangled in the leaves and kindling.

"That far."

"Better than the clouds, anyway," he teased. She pulled away, frowning. An expert at distancing herself, he supposed.

_Roo, I missed your pouch._

"The brain weighed 1255 grams and showed parasagittal atrophy with sulcal widening," she said, monologue-like, as if she had practiced. "Sections of the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal cortices showed numerous senile plaques, prominently diffuse type, with minimal numbers of neurofibrillary tangles. Cortical Lewy bodies were easily detected in H&E stained material. The amygdala demonstrated plaques, occasional tangles, and mild neuron loss."

He stared at her, narrowing his eyes. "What're you saying, Lee?"

Her eyes got big and her lips quivered. "Your mama's autopsy report. Mine'll be the same, Bo. In a later or earlier state of decay maybe."

"Better not be kidding with me," he said, angry. "For your sake, you better not be kidding."

"_I'm not._ I've got a tumor and it's eating up my brain, just like Trudy." She paused, chewing on her lip. "You'll get me an autopsy report when I die, won't you, Bo? I want the end of my life wrapped up nice and tidy, too, in a manila envelope and everything."

He didn't speak; he already knew the answers to all the questions that tickled the inside of his skull. _Can't the doctors do anything? Can't you get better? Will it be painful? Will you go crazy like mama did?_

"But you better not turn me into wax. I swear to God, if you do that I'll haunt you." She teased him now, grinning. "You don't want your pants back, do you?"

He shook his head, solemn. She laughed at his gravitas, snatching his hat off his head and seating it on her own. It tipped rakishly, hiding an eye and an ear. She gazed at his gas attendant uniform, amused. "You pumping gas now, Bo?"

He looked her in the face, mouth and eyes grim. Severe. "How long have you got left?"

Her face grew less animated, more contemplative. "Ten months. Maybe a bit more."

"Ain't you supposed to be in a hospital?"

She shrugged. "I haven't got a lot of time to waste."

He latched a finger around her belt loop, hooked, and reeled her in. He leaned in, mouth on her collarbone, and spoke into her neck. "I never would have let you get away, Lee."

"Wouldn't you?" She laughed. She reckoned she ought to do plenty of that before the pain kept her from finding anything funny at all. She'd always admired middle-aged women with laugh lines, like they'd enjoyed life so thoroughly they couldn't help but show off how immensely amusing they found everything to be. Even if she was doomed to die young, Lee was determined to let-go-of-the-grass with a wrinkle or two. Perhaps they'd be shallow, more implied than substantial, but that at least would be some testimony to her nature.

"Never," he repeated. And then, "What have you been doing all this time, anyway?"

A lot, quite frankly. There'd been three months of wandering and sleeping in some junkyard car she'd bought cheap. Quite a bit of wondering why her head hurt so damn much (she knew, now, that it had something to do with her brain pressing up against her skull, or the tumor rotting all her insides to quivering appendages and sickly hell-ridden _shit_). Then she'd had that first epileptic attack, waking up in a hospital to a diagnosis and a death sentence. Another four months of pursuing recovery before she discovered absolutely nothing could be done. Until she made up her mind to return to Ambrose, she'd driven cross-country – seeing what was out there before she ran out of time. And now, she wanted to live out whatever pertness there was left in her the way she'd always wanted to as a kid. Yes, she and Bo; living Some Kind Of Life.

"Plenty," was all she told him.

He resigned himself to silence, knowing full well that she never answered a question, if she could avoid it.

"I missed you, Bo. Swear to God I did. I don't know why I leave the way I do – I just get so restless sometimes." She stepped forward, wrapping her arms around him awkwardly and uncharacteristically, staring up at his face with mild interest. He smelled constant and familiar – musty and archaic and omniscient. She trembled – seized by some paroxysm, some haphazard spasm. The desultory shiver startled him, prompted him to ask, "You ain't cold, are you?"

She shook her head into his chest. "No, just someone stepping over my grave, is all. Some harbinger ringing me a death knell." She was silent for moments, as if impatient for the tolling of her passing's bell, until she stepped back so abruptly his arms flew from her shoulders. "_Jesus,_ I'm starved, Bo. What have you got for me in this dead beat town?"

"Not much," he said, grinning. "'Less you like dried soup." She made a face and he laughed.

"I can do without."

"Thought so."

She was silent, again – thinking, he assumed. He recognized this instance from a thousand separate occasions. There was no stillness in her, the graveness of her face interrupted by tapping feet, twitching fingers, teeth biting down on lips. When they were kids, this would be followed by some vehement compulsion. He could recall a time when he was eleven and she nine, fidgety and restless as she was now. Taken by some sudden notion, she had cocked her hand back and punched the stucco wall of the schoolhouse, busting her knuckles and splitting her fist wide open. Her agitation satiated, she sat back on her haunches and nursed her hand, the blood contrasting eerily with the pristine white uniform shirt. Afterwards, when the teacher had ceased shrieking and cooing, having instructed Bo to accompany Lee to the nurse's office, she tried to explain to him why she did it. Something about feeling fizzy and having been filled to the brim with impatience and needing to lash out or scream and there'd been a hiss of indiscretion that whooshed through her and she couldn't help it and she'd never felt better after the crunch of bone had met her ears and liquid consistency on her hands and how she was curious as to whether blood really is thicker than water, and guess what? _It is, Bo._ She had felt it on her fingers and loved the sibilation quaking upwards her throat. _It felt good, Bo, to do something and not have to wait for the sensation! There is a smell to this ambiance and it is infecting!_

"Do you believe me?" she had asked him.

"Yes," he had replied, and as an adult he blamed her for giving him this knowledge, blamed her for letting him onto the secret of violence as a past time and blood as a sport. It's all her fault and he is glad of it.

After the nurse had bandaged the fist, the other hand wrapped around Bo's, she had returned to the schoolyard and continued with recess despite being told to call home. Despite the blood staining her shirt. It wasn't until the teacher insisted angrily that she agreed to wear Bo's jacket for the rest of the day, indignant as she zipped up the front.

Of the two of them, he'd always considered her the more (how to say?) _reality disinclined._

"Anymore sculptures in town?" she asked, snapping Bo out of his reverie.

"'Course."

"Show me, then."

She followed him down the fire escape, handing him her beer as she dropped from the ladder to the ground. Holding it aloft, he asked, "Ain't you startin' a bit early?"

She laughed. "Hardly. It's near five in the afternoon."

"Can't be. I don't sleep in – you and Lester do."

"Not today. He gave me a ride into town from the interstate. I helped him touch up the paint on the sign down the road." She paused, rocking on her heels and staring tentatively at the beer bottle. Before she could toss it at something, he snatched it away. She grinned, appreciating that he anticipated her actions as if she'd dictated them. "Kid's got a hell of a sense of humor. He had me laughing the whole way through."

Bo scoffed. "Only because he wants to sleep with you."

She frowned. "Does he really? _For fuck's sake._"

"You should see the look on your face."

"I hope you're fooling with me."

He feigned insult, smirking wolfishly. "Now, why would I go and do a thing like that?"

"Bo, _don't._ He's like my little brother. I gave him baseball cards for his seventh birthday. I helped your mother bake the damn cake."

"Did you now? I don't recall."

She shuffled, looking not entirely uneasy, glancing at his wrists. "You were in the basement. You tore up Vincent's mask, then destroyed the mould." He remembered that. He'd spent the day trying to fall asleep in his father's surgery chair, his injuries making him soporific, but the straps cut too hard and the guests upstairs spoke too loudly, singing Happy Birthday. He remembered listening for her voice and not hearing it. He remembered drifting off for moments, and waking to find her curled up beside him, in a polka dotted party dress and partially undone apron. He remembered being embarrassed, or ashamed, when his father walked in on her pressed up against his chest, sleeping. He pretended to do the same and his father never mentioned this _inappropriate behavior_ to his mother.

It was his favorite memory of his dad, actually. If you ignored the blood and the duct tape it'd all be peachy.

She trailed behind him as he led her through the town, her feet scuffing the ground in time to the lilting coo of her humming. She'd always been a tad bit empty-headed. Intelligent, yes, but with not much thought or bearing. She could tell you something genius, something you had never known and could scarcely conceive understanding on your own, then follow up with an observance so cursory you could do naught but shake your head. She had once described to him, at great length, the chemical composition of paraffin and its being a member of the alkane series and how to balance the equation when compounded with fire and a solid hydrocarbon mixture and whether or not it was soluble in benzene and on and on and on. She'd explained it all so thoroughly it had actually become mildly feasible.

And then she had paused mid-sentence and exclaimed, "The sky's so blue! Is it always like this?"

She hadn't understood when he chuckled, not until he answered her question, saying sardonically, "Nah, doll face. Been blue since only yesterday."

By and large, he was often more awed by the things she said than not. But sometimes he could not help but slap his knee and laugh.

_Roo, I missed your pouch._

He loved her, though. Something in the back of his mind shrieked, _Keep her safe! Don't let anybody hurt her!_

This did not exclude himself. He had imagined her many times, in various degrees of undress or dramatization. But she was out of reach, unobtainable. Not to be touched. No matter the things she did – she was innocent and could not be exposed to such crudities as sex. She was no virgin; he knew that of course. But yet, after she'd been sent away, and parents and teachers alike whispered about how she had been marked by immorality, many blaming this on him, he'd known that this just could not be true. Lee was simply _not corruptible. _He'd always known some people are just like that, and any who refuse to believe so are naïve, ignorant, having never met such a person themselves. Which is their loss.

He'd thought the same of Vincent, up until he himself had ruptured that probity, instructing him to make the House of Wax _more realistic._ Lester, even, until he first saw him look at a woman and lick his lips. Oh well. Meeting just one of these people in his lifetime had rendered all ramifications null and void.

"Here," he told her, pausing before the pet store. "This ones newer 'an the rest."

She peered in through the window, unable to contain a smile as she watched the wax animals wagging their tails and swinging on their perches. Like the church, and the old woman who swept back her curtains, the pet shop was activated by a separate generator than the one in the Sinclair's basement, coming to life all on its own.

"Damn, that's a hell of a likeness," she said, her hand pressed up against the glass, parallel to a wax dog's nose. "Are they real under that? Or did he make these ones from scratch?"

"They're real."

"You didn't kill them, did you?"

He shook his head. "Their mama up and left them. All died 'cept for one."

"What happened to it?"

"Vincent kept her. Her name's Lady, though she's anything but."

She laughed. "Animals never did like you."

Down the streets they went, he pointing and she staring in though the windows. Nothing new in Flannery's grocery shop or the drug store, but in the town's bar (Flannery's again – he'd been more affluent than even Bo's father with his medical practice) a man sat forlornly on a stool, staring at an empty mug of beer. He told her when the power was switched on the bartender cleaned the countertop with a dishrag, arm rotating back and forth. In the theatre, a man had been added to sit at the box office, another at the concession stand, _Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? _playing nonstop through the double doors.

It was the church, though, he knew would really tickle her fancy.

She stepped inside, taking one look at the pastor's face and gasping. "God, it looks just like him."

Before, the congregation had faced only the coffin, no man of the cloth there to recite them a hymn. But since the old man, who'd been on his way to his niece's wedding, was in need of a fan belt nearly six months ago, the wax citizens had found themselves a holy man. Well, hallelujah.

She stepped up to the pastor, making her way down the aisle as he watched from the doorway. "He's got the double chin and everything," she said. " Looks like the same guy."

The original pastor, who had been on of the few remaining townspeople after the Sugar Mill shut down, had been victim number one. In fact, Bo had gone after him so viciously none of his face could be salvaged or reconstructed after the beating, and was useless to Vincent. The Man From Illinois, as Bo often called him, was an acceptable enough replacement, however less authentic he may be.

Contempt was first and foremost as Lee once-overed the figurine, kicking at his robes in disgust. Before she had been, in Doctor Sinclair's own words, "Removed From Proper Society," the pastor had led a tirade of godliness against her, preaching to the congregation about sinners and whores and the burning sulphurous pits of hell. She'd been barred from attending any service, excommunicated as good as any a word to describe it. Though not in tune to the teachings of Christ, she had been at least more a believer than he, and it hit her hard to be regarded as so wicked she was unfit to enter a House of God. It wasn't long after that he, at seventeen, was found to be similarly unhallowed, though less so, and instructed to no longer attend. He was marginally faithless anyway, and paid such belligerence no heed.

"You'll stop this one day, won't you? It has to end. Someday it has to end," she murmured, just loud enough for him to hear over the grinding organ music playing on the tape deck. She laid a hand on Trudy's, susurrations sonorous in her fingertips.

He shook his head, crushing a newly lit cigarette into the toe of his boot, pitching it against the furthermost pews. "Not a fucking chance."

She exhaled audibly, her back still to him. "Trudy told me, 'Make sure Bo doesn't get into anymore trouble, Lee.' On Lester's birthday. I stuck the cake in the oven, then I went down to the basement, with you. You were sleeping. Your hands were bloody and you were sleeping. Happened so often you could just _doze_ through it, and Trudy cared not if I saw." She laughed. "That's fucked up."

He didn't answer – she made him so damn angry sometimes. Enmity ripped through him, and he thought of fucking her.

"I'll be dead soon, and I still haven't changed a thing." She turned, leaning up against the coffin. "_And all our veins are intertwined._ It'll never stop if I never _make_ you stop, will it?"

"You won't do a damn thing, doll face. You'd do anything I tell you to, and right now I'm telling you to shut the fuck up."

She was silent, obeying. True, she'd so anything he said, anything he asked. She listened, and he'd not a clue as to _why_.

He smiled and she frowned.

_"You're my best friend, Bo," _she used to say to him in the schoolyard, she nine and he eleven, through the monkey bars and jungle gyms.

Willowy and lithe, older now, biting hard on the inside of her cheek. She belonged solely to this place, situated within his very memory of how it once was. She should never have left, ever. Not a year ago and not the many times before. She _belonged_.

She sighed; to emit a similar sound – as in weariness or relief. She shivered once more, hugging herself and approaching–

_Sylphlike. _

He, himself, rough; grating. Waspy and mean.

"_My best friend_," she whispered, appraising him with a scrutinous gaze before departing through the double doors.

He grinned, appreciating that she anticipated his ruminations as if he'd dictated them.


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's Note:** This happens to be my favorite chapter, so, as always, enjoy! A review would be appreciated, but, regardless, thanks for reading. And, by the way, if you didn't already know this, the soon-to-be mentioned Lent and Ash Wednesday are religious holidays. You're meant to give something up for forty days (ever seen the movie "Forty Days and Forty Nights"?). I don't celebrate it, but whatever, _someone_ out there does.

&&&&&&

She had always known there would be consequences, ramifications, to this unnatural life they had led. Perhaps she could say it was this that made he and she the way they were then, but these would be shallow suppositions, made without understanding.

"I'm a rumor that I started," she told him once, smiling wickedly. "You, too."

Actuality would reveal that they were bad, _bad._ Ill-wrought, ill-conceived, ill-begotten. To have as one's domicile, to dwell, house, reside – to maintain existence in this certain way.

_Bad._

Not achieving an adequate standard; poorly brought about.

Evil; sinful.

Vulgar or obscene.

Disobedient and naughty.

Disagreeable, unpleasant, unfavorable.

Not spoiled – _rotten._

Injurious in effect; detrimental.

Full of or exhibiting faults or errors.

Having no validity; _void._

Being so far in repayment as to be considered a loss.

Severe; intense.

Most of all – sorry; regretful.

_Badder? Baddest?_

Something that is below standard or expectations, as of ethics or decency.

Ugly and wild and ragged and tempestuous.

_Tempestuous!_

As children, there had been occurrences, circumstances, in which they could not contain their agitation. They'd leave school, creep to the gas station, and steal their way into the basement through the loose grate in the ground. He was fifteen, she was thirteen. A soft drink in her hand, a cigarette in his. They'd trade.

Sip. Suck. Switch.

She'd swill tentatively, he'd flare his nostrils like a mad bull, smoke pouring out all available orifices as she laughed wildly at his relative inexperience with such lung-damaging substance. _Sylphlike; _vaporous and raging and seething. She was all smoke and mirrors.

They got caught, once.

It was her fault, they both knew. She had no right to make him laugh so hard.

He had asked her, innocently, what she had given up on Ash Wednesday, for the forty days until Easter. What, pray tell, had she found to be significant enough to swear away, as a good Christian would, all caught up in their fasting and penitence?

"Fuck that," she had scoffed, snorting at the ridiculous concept. "I gave up Jesus for Lent."

His response had been so uproarious he'd fallen to the ground, upturning a toolbox in his haste, gasping and clutching at his stomach for lack of breath. She smiled, blowing cigarette smoke at him through her nose, pleased he found the jest so overwhelmingly comical.

The attendant, nametag declaring "Lonnie," had not been amused. He overheard and discovered them, their sneaking around normally conducted during his lunch break, and marched them to their parents. He insisted, _insisted,_ there had been something in the air – lusty and corrupt. Something like sexual tension. Lee didn't understand. No, _no, _there had been friendliness! It had all been commonplace! No funny business, nothing tricky or deceitful.

Bo agreed with Lonnie, but kept it to himself. _She could have been your sister, _he reminded himself, repeating it again and again as he was punished. Accepting the penalty, even, if it would teach him the lesson.

Her father had been dead for years, but her mother shook her head and sighed. That was enough, that was substantial. She sighed again and again, weary and just oh-so-tired. A gloom, a dimness, set itself about her countenance, prompting Lee to beg, plead for forgiveness. "_I'm sorry, Mama!_" she shrieked. "Please _don't_ look at me like that! I'm sorry! _I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"_

She screamed, imploring, penitent, chest heaving backing herself into a corner crying crying crying tearing out her hair and asking, appealing, craving forgiveness!

_Please_, _forgive me! Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me!_

Her mother naught but stared, disappointed, letting her daughter torture herself into subservience. Her silence was taunting.

Lee realized 'forgive' is one of those words that sounds like nothing if you repeat it often enough. Obscured and beclouded.

_Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me!_

_Please forgive me!_

The next time she saw Bo, his wrists were agitated, red, sore as he wrung his hands, embarrassed. Vivid and unflinching. She snuck him into her room and wrapped them in gauze so no one would know at fifteen his parents could still inflict damage. More so than ever; his mother was full of death and dangerously nearing insanity. No one had to know they still punished him, as if a child, no longer strapping him to the surgery chair, choosing instead to exacerbate what wounds had lingered. He still let them do so, if only because he was afraid of what might happen if he didn't.

_What would become of him if he wasn't punished for his sins? Would they collect? Would they multiply? Would their significance consume some celestial body or another? Would they eclipse? Would they fall into obscurity or disuse?_

A kind of tribal simplicity overcame her as she brought the deformed skin of his wrists to her mouth, tasting the salt and the tang and the–

–the something unfamiliar.

Formalyde. As if someone had soaked a rag in it, pressed it to his skin, to open scars and scratches and scrapes and let it leak inside of him.

Toxic. Lead based and poisonous.

She tasted it and gagged.

He told her about the sensation that crept up his legs, years ago, when he was still small enough for the chair. They'd felt as if they were going to fall off. As if they were dead.

"If you didn't have legs, you'd need a wheelchair," she told him, grinning. "You'd be a paraplegic."

He nodded, feeling not so far away from her. Not like clouds or treetops, not like parachute men dropping into bushes.

She rested a hand on his knee. "You wouldn't be able to feel this, would you?"

"No," Bo said.

She reached higher. "Or this."

"Nothing."

"Or even this." Her hand was poised perilously near to his groin. She smiled playfully, like, _this is all just a game, anyway._

"Nope," he said, but his mind disagreed. A faintness came over him like the faintness of the formalyde mixing with his blood, seeping into him. A troubling and pleasing sensation – as swift as a kick. He wanted to tell her about masturbating to the thought of _she _masturbating to _him._ He wanted to tell her about acidity in the veins, about blood on the outside of skin. About the dirt and dust that sunk into the fissures of her fingertips and filthied the whitewashed walls of his bedroom.

"I will show you something," she whispered to him. "_I will show you something different from either–_

_your shadow at morning striding behind you– _

_or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; _

_I will show you fear in a handful of dust."_

She reached out for his face, but he flinched away. She looked hurt.

"You could have been my sister," he explained.

She nodded, agreeing. "You could have been my brother."

Their hands met, wrapping themselves about each other and seeping through knuckles and fingertips. Formalyde and gauze and blood and dust. _And all our veins are intertwined, and I will show you fear, yes, I will show you fear in a handful of dust._

_Oh, all our veins are intertwined, and all our sores are sticky and stuck and bound, and how easy is it for the proper false in women's waxen hearts to set their forms!_

She told him all about the townspeople, the Ambrosians, that knew only (_oh, son of man!_) a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, the dry stone no sound of water. Only–

They are conservative, discreet, quiet, subdued, tasteful. Supremely unobtrusive. By all means, they, the townspeople, deserved hellfire! Damnation!

_I will show you fear in a handful of dust._

The fires of hell for them, the punishment for sinners! The ominous grave! The apocalyptic bane of man!

_You are Adam, I am Eve – born of your rib, born of a piece of you. You gave a part of yourself so that I might come about._

"God will give them to us," she whispered, seething, promising. "God will give them to us, and we will do with them what we will." She stared down at his bandaged wrists, snarling. "How dare they touch you! _How dare they feel that they are constituted thus!_"

She plagued, scourged, afflicted with her words! She would be his undoing! She would lead him astray!

He loved every word of it.

Who was it to say he and she were sinful? Who was it to say _they_ were steaming wreckage and havoc and exposed, bleeding sinew of flesh? Who was it to assume, incur, shoulder, tackle, postulate, presuppose, preempt, seize, take, usurp, appropriate _anything_?

She told him there would be a day of – not vengeance, not that. A day of allotment, of settlement. Of getting back what had been taken from them.

She was all smoke and mirrors. Of course she meant not a word of it.

He did. He remembered all of it; he remembered it longer than he remembered her.

_God will give them to us!_

_A day of allotment! Of settlement!_

Not 'til after she was taken from him did he act on these words, for her of her because of her. The pastor, first. Vincent and Lester didn't help until after Bo was through with him (he _loved_ it – that first kill!). There weren't many people left; the Sugar Mill had provided jobs, and its eradication had provided an absence of jobs. Workers left with their families, then businessmen and schoolteachers and municipal employees, then the rest.

Those who remained would have to suffice. They were the allotment – they were given to him by God to do with what he pleased. They were punished for their sins, for taking her from him.

By the time she managed to make her way back to Ambrose, the settlement had undergone its transition and he was only mildly satiated.

"You did all this?" she had asked; haggard, horrorstruck.

"Like you said, sweetheart."

"This is the allotment, then?"

"Right you are."

She'd been enraged, unbelieving, incapable of grasping it. "_What makes you feel that you are constituted thus?_"

He'd laughed. "God gave them to us. Mama gave them to us."

"To us," she repeated dumbly, knowing it was true.

"You and I, Vincent and Lester."

Fleetingly, she blamed her younger self for all this carnage. She had been ignorantly vindictive, she had called for this. She had demanded _this_ of him without knowing it. Herself as a child, nine years old, looked back at her – fist split open, blood splattered on her collared uniform shirt, eyeteeth grinning doggedly. _Feeble,_ herself was saying. _As if anyone's childhood is an excuse for anything. Don't blame _**me** _for_ **you**.

Lee realized her old self had been fiendishly clever, wiser than her new self. Impish; an old soul.

"You're right," her new self had admitted to Bo. "God gave them to us, to do with what we will."

_Tempestuous! Tumultuous!_

_I will show you fear in a handful of dust!_


	3. Chapter 3

He watched her approaching through the living room window, a scowl set firmly on her countenance, a quizzical frown on his own. Her feet scraped the ground with exaggerated intensity, gravel and loose asphalt skittering from her and coming to a halt before the grassy medium. She traipsed slowly, like one who travels from so far away she doesn't expect to arrive.

She was angry. That was apparent.

He recognized Bo's work pants hanging loosely off her frame – he had, after all, been listening to Bo's complaining of their absence throughout the past year. He nearly chuckled to himself; even now that she had returned, there was no way Bo'd be getting them back. She had claimed them, they were hers. There would be no contesting that.

Her manner struck him as out of place, this ungainly nonchalance. Wasn't it odd now, _wasn't it_, how she came nearer and nearer, with such an absolute ease, an ease he would not himself have presupposed had he been gone quite so long as she? It was – _it was odd._ She should be more nervous, more jumpy, more exited, more visibly stirred, more _something_, shouldn't she? _Shouldn't she? _She grew steadily nearer, her presence so impending, so proximate, so tangible, so fucking nigh. And then–

Before ascending the front steps of the porch, she faltered. Her hands, which had until then been clasped tightly to her sides, flew to her temple, pressing the Mount of Venus of her palm atop her brow. Her mouth formed a pursed "O", her eyes squinted in pain. She rocked backward on her heels, as if losing her balance, and stood noiselessly still. Her shoulder, slack in posture, tipped carelessly, and he strained to hear the single hissed word that escaped her.

"Fuck," she spat, and then repeated again. "_Fuck!_"

He very nearly rushed to her aid and herded her indoors, the pain she communicated so obvious and open, but kept himself from doing so. Going to her would be admitting to having watched her, and he found himself seemingly unwilling to reveal this.

Then she tilted, swaying, and just barely caught herself before she collapsed.

His hand was on the doorknob, he himself prepared to hurtle outdoors and assist her, before he glimpsed Bo rounding the corner further down the street. He noticed fairly quickly, just as Vincent had, that she was suffering of _something_, and quickened his pace. Now behind her, Bo placed a hand at the small of her back and urged her up the steps, another hand placed supportingly on her shoulder. He asked her something, Vincent could see his mouth moving up and down, opening and closing like the imbecile fish that had once thrived in the town's pet store, and she nodded slowly in response. Before they could knock, he had twisted the knob and – a foul wind blowing indoors – okayed their passage o'er the threshold. Bo paid no heed, as he otherwise might have, to their quick entrance, making obvious the fact that Vincent had, _indeed_, been aware of their presence on the doorstep. Rather than glare suspiciously, Bo steered her towards the couch set up by the ridiculously bulky pool table, and rather forcefully bade her sit down. She complied readily, seating herself as a cloud kicked up by her feet settled about her.

So Oleander had returned. That was certainly something.

And the _manner_ in which she had done so! First angry, then sickened, then in pain. _Well, then. _Vincent found himself hyperaware of having learned something last – of being the only one in the room who had not a clue as to what exactly was going on. She sighed now – a long, tight sigh reminiscent of holding one's breath in for awhile, an uncomfortably long while, before finally allowing yourself to breathe.

Bo stared at her with concern, a concern he saved for her well-being alone, not his or anyone else's, and asked, "Are you gonna be sick?"

She began to nod, before quickly deciding against any bobbing motion, and answered instead with a faint, "Maybe."

Bo turned halfway to Vincent, speaking over his shoulder. "Go fetch a bucket," he ordered, methodical. Systematic. "And be quick about it."

Vincent paused a moment, deliberating as to where exactly a bucket could be found, before heading off in the direction of Bo's truck.

And then he realized why exactly he had found her behavior so familiar. His mother. The headaches. The nausea. The spasmodic air she had about her.

The tumor.

The tumor?

He cast the idea out of his mind and focused once more on the retrieval of a bucket.

_Think only of that,_ he told himself.

_The bucket._

Instead, her voice came to mind, Lee's voice. Far younger, childish, maybe ten years old.

"_Ollie, ollie, oxen free!"_ she had called, playing hide-and-seek. Giving in, actually. Fed up with searching for them. _"Come out, come out, wherever you are!"_

He, Vincent, had always been best at hiding, and Lester had been worst, as all little kids are, at _everything_ (or at least so he had thought, Bo agreeing, exasperated, at the time). Lester had been five years younger than Bo and Vincent, three years younger than Oleander, and an inadequate counter, seeker, and hider. They let him play only because he'd otherwise follow them around, pouting, and give away their hiding spots.

Bo had been best at seeking, daunting in his knowledge of your presence, and Lee had been best at making the game scary. She had always known the right time to scream, the right time to exclaim in hushed whispers, "Go!_ Go! _He's coming!" She knew the right time to dawdle, to allow herself to be caught as a sacrifice towards the betterment of the game, forcing you to run faster, knowing that you were next.

"_Ollie, ollie, oxen free!"_ she would call. _"Come out, come out, wherever you are!"_

He returned, bucket in tow.

Upon entering the room, he eyed the two briefly, and then averted his gaze, abashed. He had glimpsed Bo's hands sweeping her hair from her face, grasping it. Vincent realized, of course, that this was only practical, certainly if she was on the verge of retching, but nonetheless kept himself from looking directly at either of them. He felt that he had just witnessed something too personal, too intimate, too private. He was used to running in on them arguing about something trivial, inconsequential, bickering away at each other like a damn married couple. Of course, it had been awhile since he had listened to any of this, and honestly the last time he had seen her (before the approaching, the swaying on the doorstep) she had been watching TV in this very living room, her head resting on Bo's shoulder, both nursing a beer. But _still_. He had grown used to his brother's unyielding gruffness, and any tenderness, albeit necessary, was unsettling. For the ephemeral moment in which he had scrutinized the gesture, he'd half expected Bo to turn on him and snap, "What the _fuck_ are you looking at?"

Vincent set the bucket by Bo's feet.

Wax coated its sides, aging and splintering and turning a sickly dismal yellow, as would cirrhosis of the liver. Paraffin up and down, layered here and there, bubbling and cystual as a failing organ's anatomical repellence. _Repugnant. _Smelling of candles, rotten and vile as coagulation.

He thought back to disposing of the townspeople's children, following suit in dissimilar demise. The apple juice. The peanut butter. The blood, spoiled. Foul. Contemptible. He could deal with death, certainly, but not with decay. He wasn't squeamish, that would be in no way fitting, that word – _squeamish._ He and Bo and Lester let those children die, let those children starve. Lee would never have done that, had she been in town when they allowed it. He imagined her as a shepherd with her flock, herding, protecting. She'd have fed them and fixed them as should have been done. Instead, those children, too young to know better, had fed themselves with all the wrong things, or nothing at all, and died.

Lee had told him once, by chance, meaning nothing 'cept to state a fact, that right before you starve to death your stomach turns in on itself and begins to feed on the rest of your insides. He imagined, unwholesome, a small child's stomach (the girl with the pigtails, maybe – she had been the final corpse, in the furthest state of decay) nibbling at a bit of small intestine, or lung, or kidney.

He didn't know why it was – ridding a grown man of his existence seemed so inconsequential. A child, though? That was abhorrent.

He could remember what Bo and Lester's reactions were. Lester had looked on the young casualties as he might a rabbit, torn to bits beneath the fender and wheels of a vehicle. Bo stared blatantly, with no remorse, tracking bloody footprints throughout the premises in which the child had been discovered.

"You care so much, you deal with it," Bo had told Vincent, shrugging. He had called for the death of the townspeople, and if the children met some end, so be it. How sundry those corpses were, splayed about the linoleum floor of the Confectionary and Flannery's Market. _So be it._

Lee knew these things; these things Bo did, and still returned. Repeatedly. Not just now, but many times. Vincent didn't know what it was about the two of them – sharing far too much history to be in love, cringing at that reference – _in love._ She would scoff at the concept, politely. Bo would glare. Love was present, in some fashion, but not romance movie screen type. That would be strange. Lee and Bo were simply not that strain of person.

_In love?_

Scoff. Laugh. Glare.

After having gone to the trouble of fetching the bucket, she seemed no longer to need it.

"I'm fine," she told Bo, not Vincent. "I'm alright. Really." She stared up at the wax monster, paraffin face man. She smiled in greeting. "Hello. I haven't said that yet, have I?"

Vincent shook his head.

"Then, hello. And thanks. And I'll be fine, for the time being, really." She nudged the bucket with her foot, hair still swept from her face, Bo's hand on her shoulder. "That's gross, a bit, yeah?" She laughed.

Of course, Bo wasn't fooled. He could see it, as plainly as she could feel it. In her head, like a needle, tearing through the membrane and grey matter and, he didn't know the proper word, brain mush? The muscles rippled in her back, writhing, something akin to beating insect wings. Something akin to falling backward into a fishpond, wriggling koi beneath her, smashed and crushed, their gaping mouths and whiskers etching into her bone _most_ criminally.

Bo knew the word for it. _Tumor._

Up the buttons of her spinal column – wiggle, squiggle, agonize. She anchored herself against the paroxysmal convulsions, the pressure of Bo's scrutiny.

"Don't look at me like that! I'll be fine," she insisted. "Really, I'm better already. This isn't bad. I wouldn't be talking if it was." Her voice dwindled halfway up her throat. She knew she was missing something. She was _always_ missing something. She could never get past the first step of finding it, which is knowing what it is.

She glanced at Vincent.

The proper right-side-up portion of his face was visible at this angle. Right side out, inside in. Skin and bone and blood and all those extra bits composed and becoming and tailor-made.

Right side out, inside in.

The Bo part of his face stared back at her through an exposed corner of the mask. Up the buttons of her spinal column – wiggle, squiggle, agonize. She didn't mind the tendon-tearage and absent-eyed look of him. That was okay. It was eerie at first, but then she got used to it, years ago. She could remember acknowledging it and not caring at age five. It was the right side out, inside in part that bothered her. Bo and not Bo. Vincent's real face was the mask, artificial or not.

A grinding came to her like the churchyard's cockerel weathervane. A gnashing pointing thataway, then thataway; north and north-northeast and a flat out northeasterly direction.

Between the two brothers, one and a half of the same face.

In whatever amount of time she had thought all that up, the brothers had exchanged words, or gestures, or maybe telekinesis-however-the-fuck-they-spoke (that pure unacknowledged understanding), and Vincent had turned, departing. He disappeared into the kitchen. Bo had lit a cigarette, even, and offered her one.

She shook her head. "I'm the one-a-day type."

"'Course," he rasped, lighting up. "And I'm the pack-a-day type, peach."

She grimaced at the sentiment. Worse than sweetheart, or darling, or doll face, or the hellish month he'd insisted on calling her Andy. _Peach._

He noticed her distaste, and smirked. Chuckled. "Didn't like the sound of it myself, actually," he said.

Staring out the window, she realized night had fallen. The town was cast in darkness, the movie theatre the only visible pinprick of light. The headache convulsion thing had not entirely dissipated, a dull throb ever present. Of long duration – chronic, lingering. Persistent.

"Now this," she whispered, sighing, "is _real_ country dark."

Vincent listened to them, eavesdropping from the kitchen. They'd sat there awhile now – talking, laughing. He stood still and _paid attention._

"The dead on all the battlefields get up and walk," she was saying then, hushed. "They walk and walk, they become a great crowd. Limping, bandaged, pale, carrying each other, not like zombies. Like real shattered people." She paused, her legs up on the couch, Bo at the foot-end of her. He gave her a look that said, _Well, get on with it._ She continued. "They walk to the houses of the living. They stare in through the windows."

Vincent and Bo, synchronously, conjured the image. Thin-bodied, frail-structured, coma-white faces ghoulish behind the panes of glass. Tap-tap-tap of fingernails. Younger twin shuddered to some small degree; older twin exhaled a great appendage of smoke.

Vincent's train of thought had wandered; he'd missed the beginning of what they spoke of next.

Bo had said something. She was answering.

"I'd always thought you were old enough for it to be okay, when your mother died," she told Bo, eyes shut, head thrown back. "You weren't really a child anymore. You were past the state psychologists talk about where children, because they're so young when they're bereaved, feel bereaved forever."

"It was meaningless, what she said to me at the end," Bo said. High on morphine his mother had been, at her death. Forty-two years old, that was all. It was after Lee had been sent away; she didn't find out until after her return four years later. Trudy's head had rested on her chest as if her neck was broken. She spoke to Bo, babbling incoherently, singing hymns and songs all jumbled together. She'd held his hand so tight her rings left marks in his hand. Earlier, when she'd spoken to Vincent and Lester, her words had made sense. And then, to Bo, last because he was oldest, she said something that sounded like words but wasn't words. Bo had no idea what his mother's last message to him was.

"Not meaningless," Lee replied. "It had meaning because she said it. Even though you don't know what she said, it had meaning because it was between you, from her to you."

Bo nodded, not really looking at her. The bulging veins and red sores of his wrists were visible, the mechanical hum of the refrigerator audible.

"It was just the literal meaning itself that wasn't immediately comprehensible," she said, taking his hand, pressing her thumb into the fibrous tissue. "That doesn't mean it _didn't_ mean."

He turned to her almost contemptuously, and asked (cruelly?), "So why'd you come back this time, really?"

She sucked in her cheeks, squinting in thought. Her hands on her knees, she leaned forward in her seat, poised to tell him the honest-to-God truth. Or something like that.

She near whispered, in mock confiding tone, "I like to see a thing through to the end."

And then she laughed.

Later that night, as she slept on the couch, huddled beneath a blanket Bo had thrown over her, he told Vincent about the tumor; he told Vincent about the quivering, the trembling; he told Vincent about the wrinkling epiderm, the koi fish wriggling up her shoulder blades.

He told Vincent _everything_.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note:** Well, six months later, here's the next chapter! Sorry for anyone genuinely interested in reading this. I've been negligent. 

**-----**

Trudy Sinclair had always had artistic pretensions.

No, that is arrogant and not even true. She had no pretensions toward anything aside from a desperate respectability. She did, however, have some artistic talent, as did Vincent. Before the wax museum, Bo supposed the nearest his mother ever got to happiness was when she was sitting at the kitchen table with her paint box and two jam jars, the angled lamp precisely focused on the print spread out on a newspaper before her. The kitchen table was large enough, if not for him to spread out all his homework, at least for he to read or write his weekly compositions beside her. He liked to look up, his brief scrutiny for once unresented (a privilege never begrudged of Vincent, Bo remembered), and watch the bright colors edging across the print, the transformation of the drab grey of the microdots into a living scene.

He did his best to contribute, though it was ultimately Vincent to which this talent was passed down. However, it was Bo who found the prints. He would rummage through boxes in junk shops, or further afield on his way home from school or on Saturdays, sometimes cycling over twenty miles into the nearest town to the shops which yielded the best spoils. Most were cheap, and he bought them with his own pocket money. The best he stole, becoming adept at removing centerpieces from bound books without damage, extracting Victorian or Tudor prints from their mounts and slipping them into his school atlas. He needed these acts of vandalism, as he suspected Lee _needed_ her own minor delinquencies. No adult mistrusted him, at least not until he was older, the uniformed grammar school boy who took his lesser findings to the till and paid without hurry or apparent anxiety, and who occasionally bought the cheaper second-hand books from the boxes of miscellanea outside the shop door.

He enjoyed these solitary excursions, later shared with Lee (she seven, he nine), the risk, the thrill of possibly being caught, the triumph of returning unhampered. His mother did little except to ask what he had spent and to reimburse him. If she had suspected that some of his prints were worth more than he told her, she never questioned, but he knew that she was pleased. He loved her and he willingly stole for her. He learned early and at the kitchen table that there were ways of avoiding, without guilt, the absence of returned love.

He was _bad twin. _Vincent was _good twin_.

But that wasn't all.

There was _younger brother_.

There was _girl next door_.

They were all cut out of basically the same mud. Just a few more dirty-kneed kids scrapping to beat hell and trying to land on their feet.

No, maybe not entirely the same.

His own upbringing had been one in which he often overheard, pertaining to his mother's illness, "We try to keep things from the boys." Sometimes he returned home from school to find his mother no longer there, a note left by his father stating, '_Your mother was a little tired this morning. We've gone to see a specialist. Get your schoolbooks out of the sitting room and go upstairs before she comes home.'_ This was before his father took her into his own care, ignoring the warnings of other doctors and making himself her sole physician. Vincent, with a face set like stone and having already read the note, would be feverishly cleaning the house, and Lester would be curled up like some small, lost thing on the couch. In later years, with Lee a much more frequent visitor and Trudy much more terminally ill, she would sit with Lester and tempt him out of his stoic moods as Bo coaxed Vincent into letting alone the dusters and dishrags and calming whatever agitation overcame him.

_Keeping things from the boys _meant living with equally fearful siblings in an atmosphere of uncomprehended menace in which the three of them were moving inexorably forward to some unimagined disaster, which, when it came, would be their fault. Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their own doing.

Even now, as he gathered himself from bed, fully adult and no longer a child, he harbored still a kind of guilt for his mother's illness, his father's consequential suicide. This blame he felt sharply, that morning in particular, listening to the sound of Lee retching in the nearby bathroom. A familiar sound it was. Not only because his mother had suffered of these afflictions shortly before her death, but also because this was the third time in a week he'd awoken to the echoes of Lee's nausea.

_Right_, he told himself. _Get up and see how she is, why don't you?_

She'd been back in town for weeks now, and though he wasn't exactly counting, he knew, unquestionably, she had only a good eight and a half months remaining. A little more, probably. Give or take a week.

Alright – so maybe not unquestionably, or indubitably, or undoubtedly. But he had some vague notion and that was acceptable.

Down the hall, through the doorway, and there she was. Perched in a corner of the bathroom, knees to chest. Hair ropy and stuck to her forehead. Pale. Shadowy. Trembling – not out of fear, out of illness. Her lips were an odd flushed color, a hue of semi-dried blood, he realized. That's all she was heaving up anymore. She didn't eat much, and all there was left in her was blood and bones and stomach acid, it seemed. She peered strangely at her fingertips, explaining to him as he stared questioningly, "They're numb."

He nodded, yawning. She continued.

"I'll get the feeling back soon, most likely. Sometime this morning. Or by noon, latest." She spoke reasonably, unobjectionably, as if being this sick was commonplace and entirely unremarkable. "You wouldn't mind, terribly, getting me a cup of coffee, would you?"

He stifled a second yawn. "Yeah. No problem." He marveled at his words. Anyone else and his answer would have been, "Use your own damn legs."

She smiled briefly. "Thanks."

It wasn't until he had departed into the hallway that she called out, "Oh, I forgot! Good morning!"

He waved dismissively, descending into the sitting room and out of view.

Lester was waiting for him in the kitchen. Bo met his steady gaze with a cross and discernibly irritable, "The fuck do you want?"

Lester leaned against the counter, familiar with this brusqueness and having expected it.

Rudely unceremonious, discourteously blunt – _anticipated_.

He shrugged. "There's a man at the gas station needs an expert. Car's stalled."

Bo nodded, understanding. "Fanbelt?"

"Well, he don't have a clue what's wrong with his car. But someone might've charged his engine with sawdust." Lester's face split into a horsy and not-altogether grin as Bo chuckled, pulling open the cupboards. The wooden rows were laden with large tin boxes, recently bought by the only occupant of the house willing to go out and buy anything edible. Each was labeled in Lee's stately script: _Dried Fruit, Sugar, Coffee, Rice, Tea, Flour, Tinned Vegetables._ The sight of the labels, the letters so meticulously written, inspired in Bo a slight spasm of compassion, painful and unwelcome, a surge of pity and regret which the sight of Lee's bloodied teeth and heaving chest had been incapable of provoking. He allowed himself to tense briefly, then let slide the job at hand, turning to face Lester.

"I'll be at the station, then. You get coffee for Lee."

Lester frowned, rubbing his chin, the hollows of his cheekbones emphasized by the odd angle at which he set his jaw. "How's she? She alright?"

Bo bit back the cutting remark that threatened to patronize Lester, the _"How the fuck do you think she is?"_, and answered instead, "Not good, but she's always sickest in the morning."

Lester didn't answer, and Bo had nothing else to say.

And by the time he realized Bo had gone out the front door, a mug was seated on the counter and hot water was on the burner.

He couldn't remember if Lee wanted coffee or tea, or if the man waiting at the gas station mentioned having a wife, or if his mother had ever been as furiously ill as Oleander got in the early morning. He couldn't remember a lot of the things Vincent and Bo _could_ remember, and maybe that's why he wasn't such a strong-arm coercive _mess_. What he could remember of his mother was Bo struggling and bleeding and Vincent watching complacently, non-curiously, and of his father a stern disposition and a blasted face muddied and warped and fucked halfway to the weekend in the midst of a crime scene investigation. It was his father's suicide more than his mother's death that rattled him.

As far as he knew he suffered no great ill by either of them. He wondered, sometimes, why their manner had varied so entirely between each of their children. With he, mild and mutually indifferent, seldom affectionate; with Vincent, doting and at times indulgent; with Bo, unforgiving and without patience.

Lee's footsteps could be heard on the staircase.

"Morning," she said, wearing coveralls stripped to the waist and a pair of ruddy brown boots.

He nodded his greeting.

"Where's Bo?" she asked.

"Tendin' to a customer."

She tsk-tsked, clomped heavily down the stairs. "Someday, this shit'll be the end of him."

And he didn't disagree.


End file.
